Established in 1996, the DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB) is an independent government agency of the District of Columbia led by a seven-member volunteer board.

President Joe Biden signed a bill on June 17, 2021 establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.  Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the United States.  To view a list of schools that will observe the holiday.  

Watch the December 2020 Vlog.

This chart shows the current operating status for all public charter school campuses as of June 25, 2021.

Since the beginning of this school year, many public charter schools have been offering limited in-person programming to students most at risk, students with special needs and disabilities, and the children of frontline workers.

Watch the January 2021 Vlog.

Please register for the Board Meeting Zoom Webinar at the below registration link. Due to enhanced security features, participants will need a Zoom account to receive access to either a Zoom link or a dial-in number.   

Many DC charter schools operate multiple campuses, some with widely varying performance. DC PCSB’s policies around the Performance Management Framework make a campus eligible for closure if it is low-performing. Currently, the Board lacks the authority to close an individual campus, whether under the School Reform Act or the charter agreements we have with our schools. DC PCSB’s only authority is to revoke the charter for an entire school, and the only way to effect the closure of a campus is to threaten the closure of an entire school unless that school’s board on its own closes the low-performing campus.  

DC PCSB supports alignment between a school’s goals and actual practice. However, the Board will generally not approve amendments to a schools’ goals or academic achievement expectations unless the following conditions are met:

• The request for a charter amendment is made more than two years prior to the beginning of a school’s fifteenth or thirtieth year of operation, or more than one year prior to the beginning of a school’s fifth, tenth, twentieth or twenty-fifth year of operation review (exceptions listed in the policy).
• The revised goals are developed using the same guidelines as are described in the most recent Charter School Application Guidelines.

Beginning SY 2013-14, all Local Education Agencies (LEAs) must maintain a compliant Board of Trustees as outlined by the School Reform Act or be subject to a Notice of Concern. Schools must have two voting parent members on the Board within the first 60 days of the start of a new school year. If a parent member resigns or is removed from the Board midyear, the LEA has 60 days to replace that parent member. When the Board is out of compliance with the requirement of having an odd number of members of Washington, DC, resident majority, the school has 60 days to become compliant or must develop a plan of action and demonstrate that it is exhausting all options to fill the vacant position(s). Failure to perform these steps could result in a Notice of Concern.

Beginning in School Year 2013-14, all public charter Local Education Agencies (“LEAs”) and their constituent campuses will be responsible for ensuring that only authorized school staff have access to the school’s student-level data in DC PCSB’s data systems, including but not limited to ProActive, SharePoint, Epicenter, and Secure File Transfer Protocol (“SFTP”) sites.